Chapter Text
By the time TwitchCon opened its doors on Friday morning, you had decided you were going to be normal about Satoru Gojo.
This was, of course, a lie.
It was a useful lie, though, because it gave your hands something to do while you arranged your signing cards on the booth table for the third time and pretended the C18 placard beside you was not actively rearranging your brain chemistry. Your own booth sat under the neat little C19 marker, stocked with prints, stickers, a small bowl of candy your manager had insisted would make you look approachable, and a stack of moth-shaped keychains that had become far more popular than you’d expected after the tournament.
C18 was close enough that if you leaned over the divider, you could touch his table.
That seemed unnecessary.
Tempting, but unnecessary.
The convention hall hadn’t filled yet, so everything still had that strange, half-awake quality of events before the public entered. Staff moved between booths with tape guns and tablets. Someone tested a microphone at the main stage and kept saying, “One, two, one, two,” with increasing despair. Boxes were being torn open, lanyards were being adjusted, and the carpet already looked tired.
Your manager stood behind you, peeling open a box of sticker sheets. “You’re doing the thing.”
“I’m setting up.”
“You’re setting up like the table wronged you.”
You adjusted the corner of a print until it sat perfectly straight. “Presentation matters.”
“His booth is not going to change if you keep looking at it.”
“I’m not looking at his booth.”
“Right… Because you’re definitely not looking beside your booth with romantic suspicion.”
You picked up your iced coffee and took a sip, mostly so you had an excuse not to answer.
The worst part was that you did feel composed. Nervous, yes, but not in a way that made you want to run. The nerves had a shape you recognized, living low in your stomach, warm and alert, the same feeling you got before a match when you knew you were about to do something mean and satisfying. For three weeks, Satoru had existed inside screens and messages, safely contained in pixels and pauses and typing bubbles that disappeared before he could commit to whatever panic had overtaken him. You knew how to handle him there. You knew where to press, when to wait, when to let him recover.
In person was different.
In person meant there would be no twenty second chat delay and no little text box to hold him at a distance while he tried to remember how dignity worked.
In person meant you could say pretty boy and see what happened to his face in real time.
That thought was doing absolutely nothing good for your professionalism.
You were reaching for another stack of keychains when you heard him.
You recognized his voice before you saw him, which was irritatingly intimate. It carried across the half-empty hall, bright with complaint, threaded with that same dramatic offense you had heard so many times through streams and clips.
“I’m just saying, if the schedule says creator arrival at nine, and I arrive at nine-oh-eight, that’s basically punctual with charisma.”
A staff member beside him said something you could not hear.
Satoru answered immediately, “No, I don’t think lateness and charisma cancel each other out. I think they have synergy.”
You looked up.
And then you forgot, very briefly, that you had been planning to ruin him.
He was tall. You knew he was tall, obviously, because anyone who had ever stood near him on stream had looked personally victimized by it, but knowing was different from watching him walk toward the booth with his badge swinging against his chest and his jacket hanging open over a white shirt that fit him far too well. His hair was a little messy, soft around his forehead, white under the convention lights in a way that made him look expensive and badly supervised. His sleeves were pushed up, exposing long wrists and hands that were wrapped around a half-open pack of gummy candy like he had brought emergency sugar to a professional event.
It was deeply unfair.
His face was unfair. His height was unfair. His long slender fingers were unfair. The whole arrangement of him was so deliberately, stupidly pretty that for one traitorous second you felt personally attacked by biology.
Then he saw you.
Everything that had made him look composed immediately malfunctioned.
His step hitched. His mouth stayed slightly open around the sentence he had been about to finish. The staff member beside him kept walking for another pace before noticing Satoru had stopped and turned back with the resigned patience of someone who had been assigned a very beautiful, very difficult horse.
You watched his eyes find your face, drop to your badge, return to your face, and then dart somewhere just past your shoulder as if direct eye contact had become a ranked difficulty setting. His fingers tightened around the gummy packet until the plastic crinkled loudly in the morning quiet.
Oh.
You set down the keychains.
Your manager made a tiny sound behind you that you chose to ignore.
Satoru swallowed. He seemed to remember, with visible effort, that he had legs and a public persona. He crossed the last few steps to his booth with a stiff approximation of confidence, stopping behind his table and giving you a smile that would probably have looked convincing to anyone who had not spent three weeks learning the exact difference between his real recovery and his decorative recovery.
“Hi,” he said.
You leaned your forearms on the booth divider, close enough that he had no choice but to look at you.
“Hi, pretty boy.”
The effect was immediate and deeply rewarding.
The tips of his ears went pink first. Then the colour spread down, quick and helpless, brushing across his cheekbones while he stared at you like you had just pulled a knife from your sleeve. His mouth opened. Closed. Opened again.
“I knew you were going to do that,” he said at last.
His tone was accusatory, but his voice came out slightly too high to be useful.
You tilted your head. “Did you?”
“Yes. Obviously. You telegraphed it. It was in the DMs. I had a warning. I had time to prepare.”
“You look very prepared.”
“I am,” he said, with the strained dignity of someone actively drowning in three inches of water. “This is the face of preparation.”
“The face of preparation is blushing?”
He reacted like you had slandered his family. “I’m not blushing.”
“Satoru.”
“I’m not.”
“Your ears are red.”
“That is a circulation thing. People have blood.”
You gave him a slow, delighted look. “Do they?”
He pointed at you with the gummy packet, then seemed to notice what he was holding and lowered it with visible regret. “Don’t start. It’s early, and I haven’t had enough caffeine to defend myself in a legally admissible way.”
The laugh slipped out of you before you could stop it.
His expression changed when he heard it. It was small, but you saw it because you were watching him too closely to miss anything. The panic didn't leave his face exactly, but something under it softened, a startled sort of pleasure that he tried to hide by looking down at his table and pretending to inspect the arrangement of his signing prints.
That was the problem with him, you were beginning to realize. The public version of Satoru was loud, impossible, and dramatic enough to exhaust a room into fondness. But underneath that, in the seconds when he forgot to perform, he was unbearably easy to like.
Worse, he was easy to want.
You had expected him to be hot. That had been built into the problem from the beginning. You had not expected the awkwardness to make it worse. His face looked like it belonged to someone who knew exactly what to do with it, but the second you looked at him too deliberately, he behaved like an overheated laptop trying to launch a game it didn't have the specs for. That contradiction did horrible things to you. Tall, beautiful, nervous men were a public danger. Tall, beautiful, nervous men who argued while bright red and still did exactly what you asked should have required a permit.
His badge was crooked.
You noticed it because you were trying very hard not to notice his mouth.
The lanyard had caught under the collar of his jacket, twisting the badge sideways against his chest so that his name sat at an angle beneath his handle. It should not have been distracting. Nothing about convention identification should have felt like an invitation. But there was something about the small imperfection that bothered you, maybe because the rest of him was already so unfairly put together, or maybe because fixing it would give you a reason to step closer.
You let your gaze drop to it.
“You’re twisted,” you said.
Satoru’s eyes snapped back to yours with immediate alarm. “That feels like a very aggressive thing to say to someone before ten in the morning.”
“Your lanyard,” you said, pointing down, and watched his expression rearrange itself from wounded confusion to equally dramatic concern.
He looked down at himself. The second he saw the crooked badge, he lifted the hand still holding his gummy packet and tried to fix it, which only made the strap pull tighter under his collar. The plastic crinkled between his fingers. His brows drew together with the concentration of a man trying to defuse something.
“Oh. Wait, no, I can get it.”
“You’re making it worse.”
“I’m not making it worse. I’m understanding the architecture.”
“It’s a lanyard, Satoru.”
“It has layers,” he said, but the protest lost confidence when the badge flipped over completely and showed the blank back instead of his name.
You looked at it for a moment.
He looked at it too.
Then he closed his eyes with great dignity. “That was on purpose.”
“Was it?”
“I wanted privacy.”
Your laugh came out quieter than before, less sharp with teasing and more softened by the sight of him standing there, tall and gorgeous and completely defeated by a strip of fabric. He opened one eye, checking your face, and the nervous pleasure that crossed his expression made the decision for you.
You stepped around the divider.
Satoru went still before you even reached him.
It was a total, immediate stillness, the kind that made you aware of how much movement he usually carried. There was no more restless hand, no gummy packet crinkle, and no unnecessary commentary thrown into the air to keep himself from being too visible. He stood behind his booth table with his shoulders slightly drawn in, eyes fixed somewhere near your forehead as though looking directly at you from this distance required special training.
Up close, he was worse in all the ways that mattered. The overhead lights caught the pale line of his lashes when he blinked. His hair was still a little messy from the walk in, soft around his face in a way that made your fingers briefly, offensively curious. There was a tiny nick near his jaw where he must have shaved too quickly, and the ordinariness of it made him feel warmer somehow, less like a person constructed from edits and stream lighting and more like someone who had stood in a hotel bathroom that morning, rushed, distracted, maybe nervous enough to slip.
You reached for his lanyard.
His breath hitched in his throat.
It was small. You might have missed it if you were not already paying attention to every ridiculous thing he did. But you were, and he knew you were, because the tips of his ears coloured as soon as your fingers brushed the edge of his collar.
“You okay?” you asked.
He nodded too quickly. “Great, yes, why wouldn’t I be? I am completely fine! So fine. I have always supported badge maintenance as a concept.”
“You’re very passionate about convention logistics.”
“I contain multitudes,” he said, but his voice had thinned slightly, and the joke didn't land with its usual bounce.
You let it rest there instead of chasing it. The strap had folded under the back of his collar, so you lifted it free with one hand and smoothed it down carefully. Your knuckles skimmed the fabric of his shirt through the open edge of his jacket. It was barely anything, a passing touch, but Satoru reacted like his body had received the information before his dignity could intercept it.
His fingers curled around the gummy packet again. The plastic gave one soft, betraying sound.
You didn't look at his face right away. That would have been too much, and you were enjoying the fact that he was trying so hard to stay still for you. There was something almost sweet about it, the way he held himself in place, letting you fix him, letting you take your time even though the badge had been corrected several seconds ago.
His name sat neatly against his chest now.
SATORU GOJO
blindfoldbuff
You patted the badge once with two fingers.
“There. Now it’s much better.”
His gaze dropped to your hand.
For a moment, neither of you moved.
Then you pulled away, and his eyes followed the motion before he seemed to remember that looking too openly might get him caught. He glanced toward the floor, face flushed, mouth pressing into a line that did nothing to hide how badly he was trying to gather himself.
“Thank you,” he said.
It came out so softly that the humour in your chest loosened into something else that felt warmer and less tidy. You had expected him to be flustered in person, and you had wanted it. You had wanted to see the blush without compression artifacts, to hear the pause before his answer without a keyboard between you. You had not expected him to be this earnest beneath it. You had not expected the restraint in him to feel like an invitation rather than hesitation.
A staff member behind his booth cleared their throat, probably because they had been trying very hard to pretend they were not witnessing whatever this was.
Satoru startled so badly the gummy packet slipped from his hand and hit the carpet.
You looked down.
He looked down.
The staff member looked anywhere else.
Your smile spread before you could stop it. “Still not easy?”
“I dropped that for unrelated reasons,” he said, the words arriving too fast. “My hand was tired. From holding things. Convention things. Professional things.”
You bent before he could, picking up the packet by the corner and holding it out to him. When he reached for it, your fingers brushed his again, and he went very quiet for the second it took to take it from you.
The crinkle this time was barely audible.
You tilted your head. “Your hand still tired?”
He stared at you, scandalized and pink. “You’re creating a hostile work environment.”
“Am I?”
“Yes. For me specifically. Everyone else seems fine.”
You glanced at the staff member, who was now pretending to inspect a box of signing prints with the intensity of someone reading sacred text.
“I don’t know,” you said. “I think there are witnesses.”
“That makes it worse,” Satoru muttered, but there was no real complaint in it.
The convention doors opened not long after that, saving him from whatever you might have said next and condemning him to several hours of a different, more public suffering.
At first, the crowd came in lightly. Small groups drifted through the aisles, still deciding where to go first, tote bags flat against their sides, phones already in hand. Then the hall filled properly, noise rising until it became its own atmosphere. Voices layered over footsteps, laughter, camera shutters, distant stage audio, the bright shriek of someone spotting their favorite creator across the room. People stopped at your booth with nervous smiles and gifts clutched against their chests, and you fell into the familiar rhythm of greeting them, signing prints, posing for photos, remembering usernames when faces gave you enough time to search.
You liked this part more than you sometimes admitted. Online, people were messages and emotes and fast-moving text, but in person they arrived with shaky hands and carefully chosen outfits and stories they had waited months to tell. They brought drawings, stickers, inside jokes written on folded paper. They told you which stream had made them laugh during finals week, which video they watched after bad shifts, which clip they had sent to a friend until the friend finally gave in and watched your channel too.
It made the attention feel less abstract. It was heavier, maybe, but also kinder.
Still, even as you signed and smiled and listened, you were aware of Satoru beside you.
Not always directly as that would have been too obvious, and you did have some pride left. But you knew when his line grew long because the sound around his booth changed. You knew when he leaned down to hear someone soft-spoken because his voice gentled in response. You knew when he made a fan laugh so hard their friend had to take over filming. You knew when his manager handed him a water bottle and when he abandoned it unopened beside his marker cup.
You knew when he looked at you.
He was not subtle about that either. He tried to be, which somehow made it worse. His gaze would flick over during breaks in conversation, quick as a touch, then dart away when you caught him. Once, while signing a mousepad, he looked up just as you looked over. His marker paused mid-stroke, leaving a tiny dark blot at the end of his signature.
You smiled.
He looked down at the blot with visible despair.
His fans noticed everything.
That was the problem with building an audience around people who watched screens for hours. They had observational endurance, arrived with evidence, too, because apparently the internet had not finished feeding on the tournament. One person brought a printed screenshot of the scoreboard. Another had a shirt with a cartoon moth perched on a blindfold. A third held up a small laminated sign that read JUNGLE CLAIMED ANOTHER VICTIM, decorated with tiny skulls and purple hearts.
Satoru noticed the sign while he was in the middle of signing a mousepad.
You saw the exact second it registered. His marker slowed first, the black line of his signature dragging a little too long across the fabric. Then his eyes lifted, caught on the laminated sign, and narrowed with the kind of wounded disbelief that made several people in his line start laughing before he had even said anything.
The fan holding it looked delighted and terrified to have been seen.
Satoru capped his marker with unnecessary precision. He set it down, braced both hands on the edge of his table, and leaned forward as though he were about to deliver a statement to the press.
“I just want to know,” he said, voice carrying over the narrow space between your booths, “why the arts and crafts community has turned against me.”
You were signing the corner of a print. You kept your attention on the smooth drag of the marker because if you looked at him too soon, you were going to laugh in a way that would only encourage everyone. “Maybe the community watched the VOD and made an informed decision.”
The fan at your table choked softly.
Satoru’s gaze moved to you with theatrical offense, but the effect was ruined by the fact that his ears were still pink from something you had said ten minutes earlier. He looked tall and aggrieved behind his table, hair falling slightly into his eyes, sleeves pushed up over forearms marked with a faint smear of ink. The whole picture should have made him look impressive. It did, unfortunately. But then he pointed at the laminated jungle sign with a marker and looked so personally betrayed by cardstock that the attraction twisted into something warmer and more troublesome.
“You did this,” he told you. “This is the downstream effect of your behaviour.”
“My behaviour?”
“You created a hostile ecosystem.”
“You kept walking into jungle.”
His mouth opened, and for a moment you thought he would argue. He seemed to consider it, eyes bright with the effort of locating a defensible position. Then the memory of the match appeared to defeat him in real time.
The fan with the sign took a brave little step forward. “You did keep walking into jungle.”
Satoru turned to them slowly.
The fan froze.
He looked at the sign again, then at the fan’s hopeful, nervous face, and the accusation on his own expression softened before he could fully commit to it. That was another thing you had started noticing about him. He could act offended all day, could build an entire courtroom out of his own embarrassment, but when someone looked up at him with genuine excitement, he became gentler almost immediately.
He held out his hand for the sign. “Give it here.”
The fan looked as if they had been blessed by a minor deity with poor sleep habits. “Really?”
“Unfortunately, yes. I need to document the crime.”
They handed it over with both hands. Satoru turned it around, studying the tiny skulls and purple hearts with visible seriousness. The line at his booth watched, phones appearing one by one. You watched too, though you pretended to be finishing your signature.
He uncapped his marker and wrote something along the bottom edge. His hand moved quickly, confidently, the ink dark against the laminated white space. When he finished, he blew on it once, then handed it back.
The fan looked down.
Their face split into a grin.
“What did you write?” you asked, because you could not help yourself.
The fan turned the sign toward you.
BENEATH FORMAL PROTEST,
SATORU GOJO, JUNGLE SURVIVOR
You laughed, and Satoru looked over at you like he had been waiting for the sound.
That tiny glance did more damage than it should have. It was quick enough that no one else seemed to notice, but you did. He had played the bit for the room, for the fan, for the phones aimed at him, but the second your laugh reached him, his eyes found you. He didn’t check to see if the joke had landed more generally with the audience, but to check if it had landed with you.
Your marker paused against the print.
The fan in front of you was saying something, and you came back to yourself half a second late, smiling an apology as you asked them to repeat it. You signed their print, listened to their story about watching your streams between night shifts, thanked them properly, and tried not to keep thinking about the way Satoru had looked at you.
That became the rhythm of the day. Public noise, private glances. A room full of people, and still those small moments passing between booths like messages no one else had the right translation for.
Sometimes it was funny. Satoru would receive another moth-themed gift and look at you as if you had personally mailed it from a villainous headquarters. You would raise your eyebrows in innocent confusion, and he would point at you with whatever object had just been handed to him, a crocheted moth, a sticker, a tiny plastic jungle plant in a painted pot. His fans loved it. Your fans loved it more. Every reaction fed the next one until the aisle between your booths began to feel less like convention space and more like a shared stage neither of you had agreed to perform on but both knew how to use.
Other times, it was quieter.
A younger fan came to his booth near noon, shoulders drawn up, hands tucked inside the sleeves of an oversized hoodie. They had waited in line for nearly half an hour, but when they reached the table, their voice disappeared. You saw Satoru notice. You saw the showier parts of him ease back, the volume lowering, the grand gestures settling into something more patient. He leaned down slightly, not enough to crowd them, just enough to make the distance less intimidating.
You could not hear everything he said over the convention noise, but you caught the shape of it. A gentle joke about the hoodie. A question about what they wanted signed. A pause long enough for them to answer without pressure. When their hands shook passing him a print, he accepted it as if there were nothing unusual about the trembling at all.
The fan left smiling, print held against their chest.
Satoru watched them go for a second, expression unguarded and almost relieved.
You looked away before he could catch you.
It was one thing to find him hot when he was blushing because you had fixed his badge. That was simple. That was manageable. It was another to find yourself standing behind your booth with a marker in your hand, chest tightening because he had been kind when no one had demanded it of him.
That was much less convenient.
By the time the joint photo request came, the hall had settled into its midday chaos. Lines were longer, staff were more frantic, and the air had warmed with the shared heat of too many people moving under too many lights. You had been standing for hours. Your smile felt practiced but still sincere, your wrist beginning to ache from signatures, your voice a little rough from raising it over the crowd.
The two fans who approached your booth were trying very hard to be calm. One had a blindfoldbuff lanyard covered in moth pins. The other clutched their phone so tightly you worried they might crack the case. They asked if they could get a photo with both of you, the question tumbling out in a rush that ended with both of them looking mortified by their own excitement.
You smiled because it was sweet. “Of course.”
From the next booth, you heard Satoru make a low sound of suspicion.
When you glanced over, he was already watching you. His expression suggested he had sensed a trap and intended to complain about it while walking directly into it.
“They want both of us,” you said.
His eyes moved to the fans. Whatever dramatic refusal he had been preparing softened when he saw how nervous they looked. He stepped around his table, still making a production of it because apparently he needed the safety of his own commentary to cross four feet of carpet.
“I want it stated on the record,” he said, arriving beside you, “that I am doing this under immense social pressure from two very polite people, which is the most dangerous kind.”
The fan with the phone gave a shaky laugh. “Sorry.”
“No, no, you’re doing great,” he said at once, the teasing gentled into something reassuring. “You asked very nicely. That’s how they get you. Excellent technique.”
The fans laughed properly then, tension breaking.
You watched him for a second, fondness creeping in before you could barricade the door against it. He was ridiculous, yes, but he was also attentive in a way that kept catching you off guard. He made people laugh without making them feel small. He noticed when nervousness needed room. He turned his own embarrassment into something other people could enjoy, then handled theirs with a tenderness he would probably deny under oath.
He looked over and caught you watching.
For once, you didn't immediately give him a way out.
The change in him was subtle but visible. His posture stayed loose, but his eyes shifted, the public brightness dimming into something less rehearsed. The fan holding the camera asked you both to move closer, and Satoru blinked as if the instruction had returned him to his body all at once.
You stepped in first.
Your shoulder brushed his arm. The contact was small, but the effect was immediate. He went still beside you, silence dropping over him so quickly that you could feel the absence of his commentary. In the corner of your eye, his hand lifted slightly behind your back, then stopped. He seemed to be calculating where he was allowed to exist.
It was so endearing you nearly turned your face into his shoulder to laugh.
Instead, you tilted your chin up enough to catch his eye. “You can put your hand on my waist.”
His face changed so quickly it almost hurt.
“Can I?”
The question was quiet and too quiet for the surrounding noise, but you heard it because you were listening to him more closely than you wanted to admit. There was no joke attached, or some kind of exaggerated legal panic. It was just Satoru, flushed and uncertain, asking even though you had already offered.
Your throat tightened around the line you had been about to say.
“Yes,” you said, softer now. “You can.”
His hand settled at your waist.
Barely.
The restraint of it was worse than if he had been bold. His palm was warm through your top, fingers careful at your side, not gripping, not pulling, not claiming more than you had given him. Even with permission, he touched you like he was making sure every second remained allowed.
The camera lifted.
You smiled automatically, but your awareness stayed on his hand. On the way his breathing had changed. On the faint tremor in his fingers when someone else in the aisle called his name and he didn't look away from the camera fast enough to hide it.
The photo clicked.
For a second afterward, no one moved. The fans were already making small, overwhelmed noises over the picture, leaning into each other to check the screen, but Satoru’s hand remained at your waist as though the instruction had not yet reached the rest of him. It was not possessive. He was almost too aware for that, fingers held with a restraint that made the contact feel more intimate than it should have. He had permission and still seemed determined not to take more than the exact amount you had offered him.
You felt the warmth of his palm through your shirt. Felt, more than heard, the careful way he let out a breath beside you.
That was the part that did something to you.
You had wanted him flustered. That had been the whole point of saying it. You wanted the pink ears, the stammer, the little collapse in his confidence that made him look less untouchable and more real. But this was different from that. This was him standing in the middle of a crowded convention hall, hand on your waist, trying so hard to be good about it that your teasing had nowhere sharp to land.
The fan with the phone looked up from the screen, face bright. “It turned out so good! Thank you so much.”
You came back to the room slowly.
“Of course,” you said, and your voice sounded normal enough that no one else would have noticed the effort. You stepped away first because if you didn't, you were not sure he would. Satoru’s hand slipped from your waist at once, but not carelessly. His fingers drew back like he was remembering the shape of where they had been.
He looked down at his own hand.
Then, apparently horrified by having done that in public, he tucked it against his side and turned toward the fans with an expression that had been assembled very quickly from whatever scraps of composure he could find.
“You both survived the photo,” he said, too bright, too fast. “Very impressive. I was worried about group morale.”
The fan laughed, still clutching their phone. Their friend asked if he could sign the back of the laminated jungle sign too, and Satoru accepted it with a sigh so dramatic that several people nearby turned to look. He bent over the table, marker moving across the plastic, and for a moment he became absorbed in making the bit good for them. He drew a tiny gravestone. Added a moth beside it. Wrote his name underneath with a flourish that made the fan cover their mouth.
You watched his hand move.
Marker ink had smudged faintly near his thumb. There was something ridiculous about noticing that after everything else. His height, his face, the blush, the warmth of his palm still lingering at your waist, and what caught you was a little streak of black ink on his skin. It made him seem tangible in a way your imagination had not prepared for. He was not only the person who had gone silent in your DMs after you called him cute. He was here, slightly overheated under convention lights, making a fan laugh while trying not to look back at you too soon.
When he did look, it was quick.
A check.
Not for the crowd. Not for the cameras. For you.
Your stomach tightened with a warm, annoyed little twist because you knew then that he had been waiting to see if you were still watching.
You were.
His eyes flicked down to your waist, only for a fraction of a second, as if remembering where his hand had been. Then he looked away so abruptly that his hair fell into his eyes.
You let him go back to his booth without making him answer for it.
That was its own kind of mercy, and you were proud of yourself for approximately twelve seconds before you ruined it.
He had only made it halfway around the divider when you reached for the marker he had left on your side of the table. “Satoru.”
He stopped too quickly.
The eagerness of it made something in your chest soften before the amusement could fully take shape. He turned back with an expression that tried for suspicion but came out attentive, like he had been waiting all day for you to call him by name and was irritated with himself for proving it.
You held out the marker. “You forgot this.”
“Oh.” His gaze dropped to your hand. “Right. I meant to do that.”
“You meant to abandon your marker?”
“For airflow.”
“For airflow,” you repeated.
He stepped closer to take it, cheeks still coloured from the photo. This time, when his fingers closed around the marker, you didn't let go immediately. The plastic barrel rested between you, both of you holding it for one quiet second in the middle of the noise.
His eyes lifted to yours.
Whatever he had been about to say vanished. You saw it happen, the little flicker of thought giving way to silence. He was easy to read up close because feeling moved through him faster than he could disguise it. Humour gave him somewhere to stand. Arguing gave the heat in his face somewhere to go. But when you caught him like this, before he had time to build a joke around the moment, sincerity rose through him so plainly it almost made you look away.
You released the marker.
His hand stayed suspended for a moment before he drew it back.
“You keep doing that,” he said.
It was quieter than his usual complaints, and he seemed surprised by the softness of his own voice.
“Doing what?”
He glanced toward the fans still moving past, then back at you. The public noise seemed to make him more hesitant rather than less. “Looking at me like you know something.”
That should have been easy to turn into a tease.
You had several options. Mean ones. Pretty ones. Ones that would have made him blush and retreat and come back five minutes later pretending he had recovered. Instead, you noticed the uncertainty under the words and let the sharper answers pass.
“Hmm… Maybe I do,” you said.
His mouth parted slightly.
Then someone in his line called his handle, not impatiently, just excited, and the moment thinned before either of you could decide what it was becoming. Satoru looked toward the sound, then back at you, torn in a way that made fondness rise in your chest so quickly it felt almost embarrassing.
“Go,” you said.
He nodded, but he didn't move right away. “I’m taking the marker.”
“You should. For airflow.”
That got a laugh out of him, sudden and real. It broke the tension without erasing it, leaving something warmer behind as he finally returned to his booth. He resumed signing with a little more colour in his face and the marker held carefully between his fingers, as though it had become evidence.
For the rest of the afternoon, you let the day carry you, but the place where his hand had rested kept making itself known.
The memory didn’t stay in one place. It slipped in at inconvenient moments, warm and unwelcome and impossible to fold away. A fan would ask for your signature, and as you leaned over the table, you would remember the heat of him at your side. Someone would hand you a print from the tournament, and the image of Satoru’s hand hovering before he touched you would return, too vivid and too tender to dismiss. You would laugh at something said in line and catch him looking from the next booth, his expression brightening before he remembered to hide it.
You had spent weeks enjoying his reactions.
Now you were beginning to understand the risk in letting him have yours.
Around four, someone brought him a tiny crocheted jungle plant in a clay pot. You heard the commotion before you saw it: the delighted laughter from his line, Satoru’s groan of disbelief, the fan’s nervous explanation that they had made it “as a tribute.” When you looked over, he was holding the little pot in both hands as if it had personally wronged him.
A tiny felt sign stuck out from the crocheted leaves.
HERE LIES SATORU
LOST TO JUNGLE
His expression was solemn with betrayal.
You pressed your lips together, but it didn't help.
He looked at you over the divider. “... Don’t.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You’re thinking loudly.”
“C’mon, it’s adorable!”
“It has my death date on it.”
“It’s historically informed.”
He looked down at the tiny plant again, and you saw the exact moment his resistance failed. The fan who had made it stood just beyond his table, hands clasped, face bright with hope. Satoru’s posture eased. He turned the pot slightly in his hands, taking in the tiny leaves, the crooked lettering, the little hand-sewn moth perched near the base.
When he spoke again, his voice had gentled.
“I’m keeping it,” he said. “But I need it known that this is deeply hostile agriculture.”
The fan beamed.
He set it on his table with more care than the joke required, angling it so the sign faced outward but the little moth would not get crushed by the stack of prints beside it. Then he adjusted it once more, meticulous and faintly embarrassed by his own attention to detail.
You looked away before he could catch you staring.
It was one thing to want him when he was flustered. That was easy to explain. He was beautiful and reactive and so visibly affected by you that it made your confidence sharpen into something almost playful. But this, the way he handled a fan’s handmade joke as though it mattered, the way he made room for people’s nervousness, the way he tried to hide tenderness behind melodrama and failed just enough for you to see it, was harder to keep separate from the rest of him.
You wanted him, yes.
But somewhere during the day, wanting had begun gathering weight.
It didn’t make you nicer to him, exactly. You still wanted to tease him until he forgot how to stand like a normal person. But now the teasing had something warmer tucked under it, something you did not really know what to do with. It felt less like you were trying to win and more like the two of you had found a way to reach for each other in public, one joke at a time, with just enough laughter to pretend it was nothing.
By the time the final signing block ended, both of you were worn down by attention.
The hall had started to empty into that strange after-event state where everything looked too bright and too used. Staff moved between booths with carts and clipboards. The carpet was littered with dropped flyers, candy wrappers, and the little paper tabs from sticker sheets. Your own table had become a battlefield of uncapped markers, half-empty water bottles, and stacks of prints that had shifted out of their neat morning rows.
Your wrist ached when you flexed your hand, which Satoru noticed.
He was leaning over the divider, jacket hanging from one shoulder, hair messy enough that it looked as if he had been running his hands through it all day. His badge was still straight from where you had fixed it that morning. For some reason, seeing that made your chest warm.
“Does your hand hurt?” he asked.
It was not loud enough to be for anyone else.
You glanced down at your wrist, then back at him. “A little… I feel like I just signed a million posters.”
He looked behind him toward the bag tucked under his table. You watched a thought cross his face, followed by immediate embarrassment at having had the thought in public. That alone made you curious.
“I have something,” he said, already bending to unzip the bag. “Possibly. Unless past me betrayed current me, which would be very in character.”
You rested your forearms on the table. “Something?”
“A wrist brace.”
“You brought a wrist brace?”
He paused with one hand inside the bag and looked up at you from beneath his hair. “My manager said signing for six hours would make my hand hurt. I said that sounded fake, because I enjoy being wrong with confidence. Then I packed one at midnight because I got anxious.”
The admission came with so many disclaimers that it should have been funny first.
It was funny.
It was also terribly sweet.
He found the brace still in its packaging and held it over the divider. As soon as it was in the air between you, he seemed to rethink the entire gesture. His fingers tightened around the plastic.
“You don’t have to use it,” he said. “I realize now that offering orthopedic support across a booth divider has an energy I didn't fully consider.”
You took it before he could retreat.
His fingers brushed yours. He noticed, but this time he didn't yank his hand back. He only went quiet, gaze resting on the brace as if that was safer than your face.
“Thank you,” you said.
He looked up.
The gratitude reached him more cleanly than teasing ever did. You saw it land, saw the way his expression opened before he had time to cover it. He looked pleased, then shy about being pleased, then vaguely panicked by the fact that you had been watching the whole sequence.
“You’re welcome,” he said.
No joke followed.
The absence of one felt more intimate than it should have.
Your manager appeared at your shoulder before the quiet could turn into something neither of you knew how to hold in a convention hall. She handed you your bag and reminded you that you needed time to change before the after-party. The word after-party brought Satoru’s attention up so quickly that he might as well have waved a flag.
“You’re going?” he asked.
He tried to make it casual. It was a miserable attempt. His hand found the edge of the divider, thumb rubbing once against the seam before he stopped himself.
You slipped the wrist brace into your bag, buying yourself a second because you liked the way he waited. His usual confidence had gone thin around the edges, leaving something sweeter and more uncertain underneath. He waited like the answer mattered and he was trying very hard to keep that from becoming your problem.
“I’m going.”
Relief touched his face before he could hide it.
Then came the usual scramble. The little straightening of his posture, the quick inhale, the desperate search for a joke sturdy enough to stand between him and the fact that he had cared.
“That’s good,” he said, then immediately looked as though he regretted the simplicity. “For the industry. Very important that professionals gather in secondary locations to discuss brand opportunities and eat tiny foods off sticks.”
“You want tiny foods?”
“I want many things.”
The answer came too quickly.
You looked at him.
He looked back.
For once, he didn't immediately fix it. He seemed to realize the sentence had opened a door, and instead of slamming it shut with noise, he stood there with the flush climbing his neck, letting you see that he knew.
The hall was almost empty now. Around you, people were packing boxes and pulling banners down, ordinary work continuing while the two of you looked at each other across the divider that had spent the whole day pretending it could keep anything contained.
You smiled, slower this time. “Some of them are snacks?”
His mouth twitched with relief and something else, something warmer. “Some of them are snacks.”
You let that be enough.
For now.
“I’ll see you there,” you said, lifting your bag onto your shoulder.
Satoru nodded. His hand was still on the divider, fingers curled around the edge near the spot where you had leaned toward him that morning.
“Yeah,” he said. “I’ll be extremely normal about it.”
“You have never been extremely normal about anything.”
“That is hurtful and accurate.”
You laughed as you stepped away, and the sound followed you into the aisle. You could feel him watching you go. You didn't turn around right away, mostly because you wanted to know if he would keep looking when he thought you might not catch him.
At the end of the row, you glanced back.
He was still watching.
The second your eyes met, he lifted one hand in a wave so awkward and abrupt that it looked like his body had been given the command before his brain agreed to participate.
You smiled.
He flushed.
Then you turned toward the exit with the wrist brace in your bag, the warmth of his hand still remembered at your waist, and the unsettling knowledge that the after-party had become much more dangerous than anything on the official schedule.